He may not have full use of his
right arm yet, but I know Robert is mostly recovered from the break in that arm
which laid him low from the end of March into early June. He has demonstrated his recovery this past
week by creating a new garden bed along the back driveway that leads into the gardens. And thoroughly enjoying the process despite
some soreness.
His vision for the new area is to
plant it with flowers and herbs, creating a pleasing sight as you enter the
garden. And in its preparation, he has
carefully demonstrated our practice of no-till gardening. After spreading a good thick layer of some of
our rich black composted dirt, he laid newspapers over the dirt. He wet the papers as he laid them so they would
not blow away before he put the top layer of mulch over them. He used pine straw
(as that is what we had the most of) for this mulch layer; it could be leaves
or straw, old hay, whatever. Now he is
ready to begin the planting, parting the pine straw and making holes in the
newspaper layer as he puts each plant in the soil. The final step will be to pull the pine straw
mulch back around the plant.
And that is a simple demonstration
of “no-till” gardening. It works for
vegetables as well as for flowers. Our
original garden bed was only tilled once, back in 2004 when we first began to
grow a small area of vegetables for ourselves.
We have piled on the mulch and
never used a hoe or tilled a bed since that. If we are sowing seeds, we part
the mulch and sow and when the sprouts get to a reasonable size, we pull the
mulch back around them. We like doing things
this way and have reasons for our preference for this method. Let’s look at some of the reasons we believe
this system works so well to build a healthy soil and healthy plants.
It
is beneficial to the soil. You do not
disturb the natural layering of the soil so nutrients, air and beneficial humus
are most abundant near the surface where the plant roots can access them.
Weed
seeds are not exposed to the light and air that they need to germinate. So there is not the necessity to hoe out the
weeds. There will be some weeds, but not
as many as you find in a tilled garden and they are easily pulled by hand.
A
covering of mulch not only discourages weeds, it also helps to conserve
water. In addition, the organic
materials of mulch prevent the run-off of rain as well as slow the evaporation
of water. The mulch also tempers the effects of cold weather as well as the
heat.
Frequent
applications of mulch to a garden build the soil and increase its fertility. The
rich layers of organic materials in the beds are beneficial to the
microorganisms that fight off pathogens and contain substances that help
nutrients in the soil become more available to the plants.
It
saves time. You can plant sooner if you
do not have to turn the soil and wait for it to dry out. Just poke the plants into the ground or drop
in the seeds.
We have followed a book by Lee
Reich, Weedless Gardening, as our guide to this method over the years we
have been gardening on Elm Street. The
benefits of no-till above come from his writings. It has worked for us and we see improvement in
our soil each year. We also enjoyed
reading older books by a lady with a good sense of humor, Ruth Stout, who wrote
How To Have A Green Thumb Without An Aching Back back in 1955. So Robert’s exercise in creating this new
gardening space is nothing new. Matter
of fact, this style of gardening goes way back and follows the process nature
takes to create fertile soil – from the top down. The first gardeners gardened this way too as
they had little in the way of tools. If
you are interested in trying no-till gardening, we highly recommend that you read
Lee Reich.
Suzy
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